Very much bigger. Ten figures of stone—each at least four hundred feet high, although that was a rough estimate, and they might actually have been even a little higher—standing around a gigantic hole in the landscape. That was what it was, in fact: a hole. Not a crater, not a deep valley. The closer they came to the opening, the clearer it became that it had no bottom, as if a divine fist had simply smashed a piece out of the earth’s crust like a splinter from a glass ball. The hole had an irregular shape and must have been larger than Venice’s main island. As Vermithrax flew closer to it, the edges blurred in the moisture drifting across the landscape like a very fine drizzle. Soon Merle saw only the vast edge in front of her, as if the lion had brought them to the end of the world. The opposite side of the abyss was no longer visible. Merle was seized by a feeling of great emptiness and desolation, in spite of the Queen inside her, in spite of Vermithrax. For hours now they’d been noticing a strange smell—not of sulfur, like the time Hell’s messenger had appeared in the Piazza San Marco, but sweeter, hardly less unpleasant, as if something were decaying in the innards of the earth.
